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The last thing Palestinian freelance journalist Duaa Jabbour wrote online before she, her husband and their children were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in southern Gaza on Dec. 9 was, “To survive every day is exhausting.”
Jabbour is one of at least 79 journalists and media workers who have died in Gaza, Israel and Lebanon since the Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, 2023. Israeli journalists killed by Hamas militants during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel account for four of those, Lebanese journalists for three and Palestinian journalists for the rest, according to reporting by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).
Journalists have died in the Israel-Hamas war at a rate of about one per day — a number that organizations like CPJ and IFJ say is unparalleled.
“It has been horrific in ways that no previous conflict has really prepared us for,” Tim Dawson, deputy general secretary at IFJ, told CTVNews.ca in an interview over Zoom on Wednesday.
“The rate of one death a day, or thereabouts, is without precedent,” he said.
By comparison, Dawson said 63 journalists died during the 20-year-long Vietnam War. The war in Yugoslavia, which lasted 10 years, saw 140 journalists killed.
According to Sherif Mansour, Middle East and North Africa program co-ordinator at CPJ, the media workers killed in Gaza since Oct. 7 have been a mix of freelance and staff writers, photographers and videographers, working for independent outlets, as well as outlets affiliated with both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
Most have died with their families in Israeli airstrikes on their homes or along with other civilians in airstrikes on hospitals, refugee camps, streets and other public spaces. Some were shot.
“There are cases of journalists who have been killed while wearing a press sign and having no close contact to a crossfire,” Mansour told CTVNews.ca in an interview over Zoom on Wednesday.
In some instances, Palestinian journalists have lost their families to Israeli military airstrikes and continued to report on the destruction in Gaza afterward. Al Jazeera Arabic Gaza correspondent Wael Dahdouh became part of the tragedy he’d been reporting on when his wife, son, daughter and grandson were killed in October by an Israeli air raid that hit the house they were sheltering in.
Dahdouh was, himself, injured in an Israeli strike on a school in Khan Younis on Dec. 15 along with Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa. While Dahdouh was able to run for help, Abu Daqqa bled to death before ambulances could reach him, The Associated Press reported.
Then, on Sunday, an apparent Israeli airstrike killed Dahdouh’s son Hamza, also an Al Jazeera journalist, along with a freelance journalist named Mustafa Tharaya.
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